Friday, July 02, 2004
Spinsanity takes on Moore
Spinsanity, which has certainly bashed away at Bush, has fisked Farenheit 911. On the off chance that you might want to waste your shekels lining Moore's pocket, read this piece first, the most accessible dissection of the movie I've yet seen.
UPDATE (7/3/04 7:00 pm): New Republic subscribers can go here for Robert Just's quite specific criticism of Michael Moore's reasoning. Just makes the point that Moore conflates two very different questions -- were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq just or unjust wars, and does the United States distribute the burdens of military service fairly? By confusing these two issues, Moore is not serving the interests of his constituency (the left), even if he is whipping them up into an anti-Bush frenzy. Here's the heart of the matter:
Just argues, ultimately, that "liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty. Besides, Lila Lipscomb and the young men being funneled directly from Flint malls to Iraq deserve better."
Suffice it to say that I do not agree with Just's implication that an all-volunteer armed forces, at least in today's United States, is morally troubling. But a lot of people - especially people on the left who generally believe that economic liberty is an illusion - believe otherwise, and Moore is clearly doing their cause a grave disservice with his movie.
UPDATE (7/3/04 8:45pm): Mark Steyn takes his shots.
UPDATE (7/3/04 7:00 pm): New Republic subscribers can go here for Robert Just's quite specific criticism of Michael Moore's reasoning. Just makes the point that Moore conflates two very different questions -- were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq just or unjust wars, and does the United States distribute the burdens of military service fairly? By confusing these two issues, Moore is not serving the interests of his constituency (the left), even if he is whipping them up into an anti-Bush frenzy. Here's the heart of the matter:
[T]he second half of the movie--in which he uses the story of Lila Lipscomb, a grieving military mother, to examine why it is only the poor and working class who sacrifice in times of war--is both profound and smart. In The New York Times, A.O. Scott called the interviews with Lipscomb the "most moving sections" of the film. If the folks with whom I saw the movie provide any indication, audiences across the country will leave the theater so moved by Lipscomb's story that they will forgive Fahrenheit 9/11 its often-incoherent points and poorly supported accusations. That, I suspect, is exactly what Moore wanted: to wrap assertions that can only be described as odd--such as his insistence that the military is failing to adequately patrol miles of deserted Oregonian coast--in the heart-breaking story of a mother's loss and the legitimate observation that America's system of military service asks too much of the poor and too little of elites.
There's a central--and dishonest--trick to what Moore is doing here: He's conflating two questions that have very little to do with each other. The question of whether a war is just (Moore's thesis is that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not) has no logical connection to the question of whether it is fought by a justly selected military. Vietnam was not an unjust war because elites received draft deferments; it was an unjust war in which the burdens of military service happened to be spread unfairly....
How do we know Moore only wants to use his point about who sacrifices in war as a distraction from his real agenda of indulging conspiracy theories about Bush's foreign policy? Because a serious examination of that issue would have required something very different from what Moore delivers. He could have taken his camera and knocked on the doors of Ivy League presidents who ban ROTC from their campuses, helping to perpetuate the notion that military service is not for our country's young elites. He could have seriously considered the arguments for a draft. The problem of the military's socioeconomic imbalance, when considered thoughtfully, isn't really a partisan issue. But that's exactly how Moore treats it, because embarrassing (presumably liberal) academics or considering proposals with non-ideological appeal just isn't how Moore does business. His approach to the issue makes clear that he is using it rather than examining it. Surely Moore will concede that whether America's wars are just or unjust--indeed whether we fight wars at all--we do need people to serve in our military, and we do need to find them somewhere. The logical extension of elite schools shutting their doors to military recruiters is that those same recruiters end up scouring the malls of Flint, Michigan. If Moore really cares about the socioeconomic imbalance of the U.S. military, you wouldn't know it from this movie.
Which is too bad, because the question of who serves in the American military is an important one, and we ought to be having a national debate about it. But far from provoking such a debate, Fahrenheit 9/11 will stymie it. That's because Moore essentially argues that the way to redress our military's socioeconomic imbalance--the way to stop the Lila Lipscombs of America from bearing an unfair percentage of the burden of our country's defense--is not to fight unjust wars. This makes no sense, but it is also a deeply attractive message to Moore's target audience of true believers, because it neatly waves away the guilt of elites who do not want their children to serve in the military. It tells them that the difficult moral question of how we determine who serves in the military--a question that should make any parent or young person who really thinks about it deeply uncomfortable--need not be grappled with, as long as we only wage just wars. Just as young viewers of Fahrenheit 9/11 (like me) may be beginning to wonder why it is that the life of Lipscomb's son was worth less than their own, Moore invites us to short-circuit this troubling, important line of reasoning with a glib piece of illogic: No unnecessary wars; no need to spread the sacrifice of military service. It's as if he forgets that people also die, and mothers also grieve, in necessary wars.
Just argues, ultimately, that "liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty. Besides, Lila Lipscomb and the young men being funneled directly from Flint malls to Iraq deserve better."
Suffice it to say that I do not agree with Just's implication that an all-volunteer armed forces, at least in today's United States, is morally troubling. But a lot of people - especially people on the left who generally believe that economic liberty is an illusion - believe otherwise, and Moore is clearly doing their cause a grave disservice with his movie.
UPDATE (7/3/04 8:45pm): Mark Steyn takes his shots.
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